With the increase in social networking websites, forums, blogs, and similar Internet websites, authors who write within these forums are more and more willing to share information regarding their intentions for future activities. These authors even post events in which they are currently participating so that others may be informed of their current status. In one example, authors may share their intentions regarding a vacation they plan on taking. In this example, the author may share this intention with others for various reasons including to solicit advice from others who may read the posting and are able to assist the author in realizing his or her intention.
Even though these authors share their intentions on a regular or semi-regular basis, this information is not useful as a source of economic gain, for example, unless the information can be extracted in some way that is useful to an entity or third party that seeks to utilize the information for an economic purpose. In the above example, if the author expresses an intention to take a vacation, a travel agency, for example, would be left to manually comb through the various websites to ascertain the intention of the author to take the vacation and exploit that intention for an economic purpose. Manually extracting an author's intentions within the text of online statements is time consuming and is not economically beneficial.